Yes, just — 1.7 GB spare

Qwen3.8 27B at Q4_K_M fits your RTX 4000 Ada entirely on the GPU at 8K context, at an estimated 14 tokens per second. Past 34K the KV cache pushes it over — quantise the cache to q8_0, or step down a quantisation, to go longer.

Fully on GPU 8K context Q4_K_M · 15.6 GB Apache 2.0 Released 14 Aug 2026 New this week Vision

The current default local Qwen: dense 27B, text + image + video, 262K context. Only 16 of its 64 blocks keep a KV cache, so long context is cheap.

What hardware do I need for Qwen3.8 27B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 15.6 GB
Weights 15.6 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.50 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 1.7 GB of 18.4 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
Q8_0 27.5 GB 28.6 GB ~2.8 −0.1% ppl 10.2 GB over
Q6_K 21.2 GB 22.3 GB ~5.3 −0.4% ppl 3.9 GB over
Q5_K_M 18.4 GB 19.5 GB ~9.2 −0.8% ppl 1.1 GB over
Q4_K_M 15.6 GB 16.7 GB 34K 14 −1.9% ppl Recommended
Q3_K_M 12.7 GB 13.8 GB 82K 17 −5.4% ppl Long context
Q2_K 10.8 GB 11.9 GB 111K 20 −15% ppl Long context

Quality is the published perplexity delta against f16 weights. Max context assumes an f16 KV cache; q8_0 roughly doubles it. Only 16 of its 64 blocks keep a per-token KV cache; the rest are linear-attention, Mamba or convolution blocks with a fixed-size state.

How to run it

terminal
$ llama-server \
    -hf Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B:Q4_K_M \
    -c 8192 -ngl 99

The engine underneath most of the others. Every knob is exposed. More on llama.cpp.

01Download is 15.6 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.
02Close anything else holding VRAM. A browser with hardware acceleration can sit on 1–2 GB.
03Only 1.7 GB is spare, so a long system prompt can still push it over. Its real ceiling here is 34K context.
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